Dayz standalone ~ Alpha now available on Steam!

That's good that Bohemia has supported one of their other games. However, my point was specific to DayZ, and how it was an Alpha that never got beyond the POC, and Bohemia continues to try to make money off the Alpha without investing any effort into completing the game. It's essentially an abandoned game that continues to steal money from customers. This is what upset me, that Xbox may let them do this with Another alpha game, that may not get any support either.

That's good that Bohemia has supported one of their other games. However, my point was specific to DayZ, and how it was an Alpha that never got beyond the POC, and Bohemia continues to try to make money off the Alpha without investing any effort into completing the game. It's essentially an abandoned game that continues to steal money from customers. This is what upset me, that Xbox may let them do this with Another alpha game, that may not get any support either.

To be fair they are making forward progress on the game. Unfortunately it's a small development team and I do wish Bohemia would allocate more resources to it. I have six thousand something hours in the game I can say it's changed a lot in some aspects, not so much in others, but has been moving forward. When you're resource bound there is only so much you can do. I think that's more of a Bohemia thing than a dev team thing.

That's good that Bohemia has supported one of their other games. However, my point was specific to DayZ, and how it was an Alpha that never got beyond the POC, and Bohemia continues to try to make money off the Alpha without investing any effort into completing the game. It's essentially an abandoned game that continues to steal money from customers. This is what upset me, that Xbox may let them do this with Another alpha game, that may not get any support either.

To be fair they are making forward progress on the game. Unfortunately it's a small development team and I do wish Bohemia would allocate more resources to it. I have six thousand something hours in the game I can say it's changed a lot in some aspects, not so much in others, but has been moving forward. When you're resource bound there is only so much you can do. I think that's more of a Bohemia thing than a dev team thing.

The effort they are putting into supporting the game is not proportional to the massive amounts of cash it has earned them. They have their money and are unwilling to move the game out of Early Access since it isn't 'finished' or stable.

Steamspy is showing it in the 2-5mil range for sales, which is an insane number of people they have basically f-ed over by trying to milk it. Is it playable? Yes, but not anywhere near where it should be after 4.5 years in Early Access.

^^ Oh yeah, I don't discount any of that. I was just pointing out that budgeting is budgeting. Bohemia as a parent company has definitely raked the cash cow out of this by reallocating resources that should have gone directly towards the game. It's a shame really. I was just propping up developers who are getting crapped on because they their parent company has held development dollars back, shoestringed a project that was totally funded by their fanbase, and generally hasn't committed to following in a reasonable time frame.

^^ Oh yeah, I don't discount any of that. I was just pointing out that budgeting is budgeting. Bohemia as a parent company has definitely raked the cash cow out of this by reallocating resources that should have gone directly towards the game. It's a shame really. I was just propping up developers who are getting crapped on because they their parent company has held development dollars back, shoestringed a project that was totally funded by their fanbase, and generally hasn't committed to following in a reasonable time frame.

It's a tough thing for a company to pour resources into a game that's no longer making money. The biggest problem with DayZ was likely that the scope was too ambitious for what their technology would allow. Dean Hall (Rocket) said as much when he left. This is part of the reason why they transitioned to a new/heavily modified engine partway through development.

What I think would've made way more sense is to have had developed DayZ in the ARMA 3 engine and released it as either DLC for ARMA 3 or it's own standalone game. This would've had the added benefit of sharing resources with the huge ARMA 3 team, ready-made maps, weapons, vehicles, etc.

It still boggles my mind that vehicles don't work properly in DayZ (i.e. getting a bus stuck on a railway crossing, crashing into sticks/bushes, etc). They could've cashed in relatively quickly (like they did with DayZ standalone) with an ARMA 3 version, and then focused long-term on DayZ 2 built in its own engine if they wished. Now I think we're going to see a focus on releasing some sort of Xbox version...they've said that an Xbox version will be out this year. This will get them a new revenue stream, but man...I don't see it being very playable on the console.

Anyway, DayZ will always occupy a special place in my heart. From the mod to the Standalone, I've spent hundreds of hours scavenging in the Chernarus wasteland using the sun or a compass to navigate town-to-town, hoping to avoid bandits or maybe catch an unsuspecting well-geared lone wolf unaware and score some sweet loot.

Yeah, I know I played a ton, even when it was just the Arma 2 mod. And yes they either should have stuck with the Arma 2 engine or waited for 3, and just re-skinned as much as possible. How is it that the mod, which was free and community developed, was more stable and more complete than this game after almost 5 years? Smh...

They really did ruin a lot of early access games for people, along with like Spin Tires. At least Rust is complete now, and they are still adding to it.

I think they seriously need to consider making the server files publically available, a big draw to me for the game is being able to wander around with a few people on my own server but I'm not paying hosting charges for it. Even if they put it on the Store for a reasonable fee. I have the hardware spare to host myself

The server files have been released, meaning people can host their own custom servers. The game is still hopelessly mired in Early Access. It was also released in Xbox Early Access about a month or so ago.

It's been a while since I've stalked around the map. A while back I transversed the West side of Chernarus pretty thoroughly and like it. Scenery wise the game has come a long way. They've added a lot of props that add context to what it might have been like as civilization unwound itself.

I might hop on this weekend for a bit to see how things have come along since then.

Occasionally I get the urge to reinstall DayZ, but then I realize nothing has really changed in over a year since I uninstalled it. I think there's been one patch, but they still don't have vehicles working properly....

So the DayZ devs dropped a status report yesterday, announcing that they are entering Beta soon (I think they've been saying this for a long time) and then will exit Early Access not too long afterwards, releasing DayZ 1.0. There's a long list of features that are being cut from the 1.0 release and moved to potentially being added afterwards. I say "potentially" because this might be Bohemia's way of cutting their losses at this point and attempting to move on from DayZ and their apparent inability to get stuff to work in the DayZ engine.

I haven’t been paying much attention for the last year+, but there’s a whole bunch of things that aren’t going to be in the 1.0 release that have been in the game already in one version or another, including a bunch of weapons. Needless to say, Bohemia’s taking a bunch of shit about…and rightfully so.

They probably could've made enough money to inject this game with the cash it needs to be finished if they'd ever put the actual game on sale. I look at it at every sale since it's been out and it never sees a real sale.

Also, SCUM's here to eat their own lunch. Weird company, that Bohemia is.

That's a pretty good write up, thanks for sharing that. It hit on a lot of points I feel the same way about. I'll not repeat all that here.

The game had a lot of potential. I barely find myself on it much anymore despite it being one of my favorite games. There were some truly outstanding moments from the mod to the standalone, some made for good stories even.

As mentioned, it makes me sad the bus isn't around. I hadn't thought of that in a while. What a party caravan that became once in a blue moon. I mainly use the game as a distraction when I do get online, but a series of glitches a couple months ago, and game breaking glitches for someone who used the game mainly for its survival aspect, kind of killed it for me. Random critical bits of survival gear would go missing when switching items from hands to storage. This usually happens in tense moments so it wasn't immediatly clear you just lost your silenced pistol or ax until it was needed again. By that time it was too late to try to recover because too much distance had been transversed. It was, I should say still is, probably my favorite game of the last decade. It is one of the few games that can keep my interest going for any appreciable amount of time (I get bored way to quickly).

I suppose I'll see what happens when 1.0 comes out, but this cake feels half baked which is a shame.

The development of this game has to be one of the strangest I've seen. I'd love to see NoClip do a documentary on it. I'm curious just how things got so bad.

Really strange. And then one of the previous lead designers, Brian Hicks (the guy that immediately followed Dean Hall I believe), has made a couple random comments on the DayZ subreddit basically supporting the position of all the angry players.

I think a lot of the problems come down to the engine apparently being so hard to modify and implement new features in. The same engine that allowed for such beautiful, vast maps also couldn't handle letting players do something as simple as throwing an object.

As CDC says above, this is one of my favourite games, and it's a shame to see it mired in Early Access hell and heading toward a very incomplete "release".